Ellen Scobie | Verosimile

The Decode show currently at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London is a delightful mix of installations, mostly offering the viewer an invitation to play, discover their likeness or interact with other participants.

To enter the exhibit, you walk down a darkened path that is lined with synthetic stems, like flowers. By running your finger tips over the top of the stems, they light up, triggering a temporary glow on either side of the path. It’s a bit like a scene from Avatar and certainly elicited lots of oohs and aahs from the passers-by. I see this essentially as a floral painting, rendered digitally. Something pretty to look at with the added capacity of the viewer to trigger its magic.

You arrive at an installation of computer monitors each exhibiting in visual form a piece of computer code. Some looked like etch-a-sketch patterns, others like endless reconfigurations of geometric forms. I think the intention behind most of this work was exploring visual form through mathematical algorithms but I didn’t find this work any more interesting than the average screen saver. The fact that the work was being viewed on an office-sized monitor didn’t help it transcend the ordinary either. The gallery had the room darkened probably to enhance the on-screen visuals, but this just served to make the printed descriptions really hard to read!

Body Paint, Mehmet Akten

The exhibit continued with a number of intriguing installations which required the participation of the visitor. In Mehmet Akten’s “Body Paint” you stood in a wide alcove with a large seamless screen at one end. By moving your arms, head, and body you triggered waves of colour on the screen as if you were painting. (see above) People were having fun with it including a mother who had her baby positioned so he could see the screen from his buggy as she called out the colours she was making.

The installation certainly encouraged play and I enjoyed experimenting by flapping my arms around, running back and forth in front of it and bobbing around. I think this would be a great technology to use in a dance performance so the stage becomes alive with colour created by the dancer’s movements and also by the audience’s actions, for an added level of interaction between performer and viewer.

Weave Mirror, Daniel Rozin

I was especially interested in the work of Daniel Rozin. The “Weave Mirror” ingeniously transferred the viewer’s facial profile onto its surface of curved paper cylinders which rotated to display a darker toned area. The smooth surface that faced the viewer had a warm, tactile quality like wood veneer or papyrus that rustled like the wind on wood shutters as they rolled into position. But the backside which was left visible was made up of complicated mechanisms. I have no idea how the silhouettes were created but clearly there was some sophisticated digital technologies behind an installation whose materiality and mechanical presentation owed something to the 19th century.

There was a particularly beautiful, reflective installation that took time to develop like an old photograph. The viewer/participant seated herself on a stool and her likeness soon became visible on a surface several meters in front of her. The likeness wasn’t particularly sharp, distorted even, and it was in tones of gray, with overlays of other textures in a sort of dreamy, grainy memory way. People seemed quite content to sit for however long it took for their silhouette to develop, the artist forcing the pace of the experience and the need to focus on the developing image.

A large component of this exhibit is the behaviour of the visitors who become both participants and performers in the gallery. Many of the installations bore testimony to the enduring interest people have in seeing their own image. I saw more than one person photographing their reflection that had been generated by the artwork, documenting their ephemeral digital image. Self-representation has been explored since humans first scratched out silhouettes with carbon sticks on cave walls. Our tools have gotten fancier but questions of who we are, alone and together, haven’t changed much.

8 Dec 2009 - 11 Apr 2010
Victoria and Albert Museum
South Kensington
London SW7 2RL

More:

www.vam.ac.uk/microsites/decode

www.msavisuals.com

www.memo.tv

www.smoothware.com/danny

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Ellen Scobie is a visual artist melding the traditional art forms of painting, photography and printmaking. View her art at www.verosimile.com